NatWest Receipts in-app feature promises to alleviate business admin

The Receipts feature is available now to all iOS customers using NatWest’s banking app

A new feature on NatWest’s app will allow the bank’s small business customers to track spending, categorise expenses for HMRC and export receipts for accounting or invoicing.

The “Receipts” feature has been introduced to enable more than 500,000 NatWest small business customers to spend more time running their firm and less time on bookkeeping.

NatWest Receipts is available now to all iOS customers using the bank’s mobile banking app and will be available to Android users in the next few months.

The feature has been designed to simplify business expenses and tax processes, and to help owners better understand their company’s monthly outgoings, via mobile.

NatWest Receipts will also enable business customers to easily capture all paper receipt images with their phone camera, store essential information about their business expenses and prepare and submit billable expense reports.

The feature will make it easier for business owners to stay within monthly budgets by filing expenses in folders that track the amount spent.
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Customers can digitally archive their purchase records, forward any e-receipts to a dedicated receipts address and add notes and tags about the business purpose of each expense.

NatWest partnered with Canadian technology firm Sensibill to create NatWest Receipts. Commenting on the partnership, the lender’s managing director of business and private banking, Marcelino Castrillo, said: “We’re offering proactive help and best-in-class innovation for free – allowing small businesses to spend less time on admin, and more time on what they do best.”

In the initial trials of its app, NatWest found that 88 per cent of its small business customers rated the Receipts feature as either “good” or “very good”.

According to the bank’s research, some 78 per cent of customers said they’d recommend NatWest because of its app.

The introduction of NatWest Receipts can be seen as a further step in the bank’s drive to provide customers with a full suite of business capability within its app and online banking services. Since the start of 2017, the lender has introduced 15 new mobile banking features for business customers.

“NatWest is making it clear that customers come first, and they’re not taking for granted how dramatically business banking solutions can make a difference in peoples’ lives,” said Corey Gross, the CEO and co-founder at Sensibill.

“When you’re running a business, you want the banking bit to be invisible. You want it to alleviate financial stress. Through this partnership, that’s exactly what NatWest is doing.”

ABOUT THE EXPERT

Fred Heritage was previously deputy editor at Business Advice. He has a BA in politics and international relations from the University of Kent and an MA in international conflict from Kings College London.